Elon Musk is well known for his hyperbole, especially when it comes down to Tesla and its AutoPilot technology. For the last couple of months, Tesla has been beta testing a fully self-driving feature that is available to just a few 1,000 customers as a part of its early access program. Now, the world’s second-richest man says, an incoming update to the full self-driving beta will “blow your mind”. Musk in his typical style dropped nuggets of information while replying to tweets. He said the update will come in two weeks and he said the safety would also be higher with pure vision.
“Gating factor in achieving & proving higher safety with pure vision than with vision+radar. We are almost there. FSD Beta V9.0 will blow your mind,” Musk tweeted to a Twitter handle called @teslaownersSV.
To another user, he even said that the feature was also coming to the Canadian market in a couple of months. He cited the delay due to the differences in driving conditions between the US and Canada.
The incoming update called version 9 will remove reliance on radars and instead will be fully dependent on cameras that are installed in the cars. Musk for the longest time has been against radars and LiDARs stating that they are too expensive and not required.
Tesla has been often criticised for its AutoPilot technology as experts believe that it is not fully self-driving tech. For this Tesla has also developed its chipset based on the ARM architecture and trained algorithms on the DOJO supercomputer. Musk is optimistic that he has the holy grail of self-driving, but he often overestimates things especially when commenting on Twitter.
Recently, Tesla has also been in the news for all the wrong reasons as a Model S crashed with two fatalities while it was on AutoPilot.